THE WHOLE AND THE FRAGMENT
One part wants to control, because it deems an action immoral. Another part doesn’t care what that part says, as to it it’s all amoral, and goes on with the action. The part that deems it immoral wants associate itself with a part that wants to claim divinity, against the part which claims it’s amoral. Functionally, thinking can see the consequences of an action, but so long as these warring factions exist, it’s hard for thinking to merely act reasonably. For it to act reasonably, it needs space to see. For example, if I overeat, I’ll be uncomfortable and I’ll gain weight. It’s clear then that I shouldn’t over eat. But the part that wants to control that says “you shouldn’t overeat” against the part that wants to overeat, so the organism as a whole has not seen that it shouldn’t over eat, only a fragment has, and so only in thought. There’s not the full comprehension. Now, generalize this example. There are many dysfunctional, disorderly, diseased consequences to certain actions, and somehow thinking can’t see it, even when it wants to see it. When it wants to see it it sets up a fragment that will enforce a decision. Can it be seen without a fragment to police it afterwards? Can it just be seen and ended? Ending, I mean, of the disorderly aspects with all their consequences.
There’s this supposed wisdom to fight against the evil, and that seems to aggravate it actually, because when you fight against it it fights back, i.e. the fragment that fights against can never be the whole, so the other fragment ,the one that is called evil, is made into the devil, or satan, or a demon, but it’s always there because of the nature of fragmentation, i.e. because a fragment is trying to control the other.
A fragment wants to pretend it’s noble, respectable, intellectual, etc, but then another is almost like the demon, which is just a personification of the fact that there’s a conflict. That’s all. The demon is just as much part of the energetic field as the part that wants to set itself up as the divine one.
It may be MUCH better for the health of the organism to not make it into a moral duality of good and evil, but rather to just see it all as functional and dysfunctional. Sometimes what is “evil” or “bad” may be good, in terms of health, for the organism, but sometimes what’s “evil” is also bad for the organism. Thus this war, where the light tries to control the darkness and the darkness rebels and waits for any weakness in the light to attack it and snatch control doesn’t make sense. The light and darkness must both dissolve themselves. There must simply be awareness of thinking, feeling, acting, without partisan alliance to one faction or fragment. Simply to see, and to understand why is sufficient. There may be many depravities, but then the question is “wWat is it to be depraved? When I’m depraved, can I see the full extend of my actual depravity? Can I see that for example I just did something impulsive, mean, and so on, out of this feeling of lacking a basic ingredient, which is a hunger, which can only be sated by lashing out. Can I see that I’m trapped?”
The light is put out by excess pleasure, by selfishness, by internal conflict which dissipates energy. So much of what we get up to is meaningless, but since we get up to it so much that’s what’s there in the brain. Our brains, in this way, become mundane, trivial, etc. It loses all vitality, and succumbs to triviality. It then hides itself from that in ideals, and calls itself high minded; but that’s precisely the fragment trying to play the role of saint or god, which will be inevitably broken down by the other fragment which plays the devil or evil. It’s still material. It’s still in psychological time. The fact is this…
The evil wants to be good, and dresses up as the saint. The evil sees that it’s masked itself as a saint, and plays the winking joker that shows it it’s true nature. It hates that, the evil that is masking itself as the saint, and fights against it; but all it can do is project it’s own evil on the evil, which is of course evil, so it will take it, and try to kill it; but that evil which is masking itself as good can never succeed because it itself is evil. What to do? Become aware of the whole movement without judgment. See what it is. Don’t conclude anything about it. Don’t try to go any further than just seeing what is. Don’t disturb it. It becomes extreme or excessive when it’s disturbed because it hides itself. What does it want? What does it expect? How does time (psychologically) enter into it’s structure? The me requires time to be constructed, as do the images of the others; but also the whole event and it’s interpretation requires time.
Take sex. Sex by itself is an animal function. Thought comes in and takes over. It creates scenarios and personas that fit into roles, and that ties into the orgasm. This either becomes sexual pleasure or sexual dysfunction, or some mixture of both. It becomes addictive because thought uses it mechanically. It knows if it pushes these levers it can get an orgasm, and it extends that process out as much as it can. This whole thing ties into all the other images. The images that it makes in sex don’t just stop there. They continue. The same fantasy I had in sex can easily be put onto a person I see in the street. Indeed, the person is thought. The person, as an entity, even the very notion of personhood, is a mental construct. The sexual fantasies are also constructs, and they are part of the same associative train and thus have shared structure. Now, one may say ‘I can separate fiction from reality,’ but that’s not true. Most of humanity, take the nation, the company identity, the race, the sexual orientation, the political affiliation, the preferred ideology, the persona, the character, as a thought independent fact; and there clearly are no lines blurring that and the sexual. The only difference is that our customs are that sex is something private, and so we try to demarcate sex and sexual fantasies, and put them in the dark. But that is not what happens, those fantasies are not actually demarcated. We lie to ourselves in saying that they are. They participate in thinking all the time. So we see that we ourselves are wrecking our own minds by using sex to sell products, for example. The very idea that I should just do whatever I can to empower myself and become rich is putting it the wrong way. This me that wants to become rich is constructed by thought, and has no thought independent reality. The thinking to become rich is active and exhilarating, mostly because the me (I as object) is thereby strengthened, extended, etc. Some doctrines go so far as to give that me a soul, and tie it into God, saying it’s a division of God in some world egg concrescence, and therefore is not just an illusion to avoid getting lost in, but rather necessary for the unfolding of the cosmos. Well, the fact is that the me is a construct of thought, that doesn’t pay attention to what it does to grow itself. If it ends up poisoning a sea, bombing the earth, etc, it’s okay, so long as the artifacts from yesterday are preserved, unless, of course, it’s the enemy’s artifacts (which is another me object, constructed by the same thought, with different qualities). The program is stuck at that level and can’t see out of it. It fears itself somewhere else. It looks in the mirror and wants to fight. If it saw itself, became aware of itself, i.e. became aware of the thinking activity that constructs the me object, it would not fear itself. It may be in despair because it’s stuck in this lamentable situation, where problems caused by the me are said to be resolved by extending the me, etc. Well, so there are no demarcations, the fragments are not actually independent. There is no ‘me’ and ‘you’, there is only thinking activity in the brain which can be roughly described as ‘human’. It’s not clear if species actually exist, or if that’s not just a short hand for ‘those organisms with which I can reproduce a fertile modified copy of myself’.
Well, so unfortunately, we’ve gotten ourself into the bind where a fraction of the species is to rule, and the rest are to be kept in a stupor of pleasure. That’s it. The moralizing is mostly gone. Sex is amoral. Pleasure is amoral. There is no God. Perhaps, that’s all well and good. What’s not good, though, is over indulgence in pleasure. That makes us stupid. Also, centering the whole cosmos about the I, and having no other goal but to expand the I – to grow it. Then I can do whatever lie, cheat, steal, corrupt a trillion people, corrupt myself, etc, if it means the I grows. This is absolutely disastrous, and I think we’ve discovered what evil is. When the individuated part of the whole claims to be the whole, and begins to act without regard to the whole, we get evil. The whole is not a nation, that’s a part. The whole is not a galaxy, that’s a part. The whole is not even the universe, because that’s a concept. The whole is what is, and what is is Truth, so the whole is Truth. The totality of all facts. Is that a new fact? Here we get into actual religious territory, and the only way to properly deal with this is to empty oneself, and that requires meditation.
Now, can thought (philosophy, mathematics, science) go beyond this movement of thinking, feeling, willing – by first positing an extension intellectually, and then metamorphosing into it’s posited extension actually? Well, here this is what it means to bring the ideal into the real. Take something simple. We have the math for higher dimensional spaces, but we don’t visually see, higher dimensions. Can we extend our brains to see higher dimensions. Then these four spacetime dimensions would just be one “reality”. The point is it would all be virtual. The brain would evolve a new “reality”, and take that as the “reality”. It seems this taking of the virtual for the Final Reality would only happen in the infancy of species. As they mature, they would start to naturally be born with insight and awareness into the functioning of their organism, and would thereby be able to self modify to extend sense organs or perhaps collapse them in emergencies. Then a lot of our mental health issues would be a consequence of a young species not knowing how to use it’s brain. It would then be essential for survival to start to become aware of not just thinking, but feeling and willing. The whole movement of the organisms existence is the domain of the organism, and in that sense it is the God of it’s existence, and in that sense is like God.
What is the I? The I is merely a reflexive designation. Then the question is of what to what? Right now the word I refers to thinking referring itself to the matter which thinks, not to the me. The me has no existence, as it’s usually understood by the majority of humans for most of written history, at the very least. We thus (humans) occupy ourselves with an illusion, most of the time. This is true of presidents, senators, executives, priests, anarchists, artists, etc. Thus, there’s no one that knows. No one that is enlightened (permanently), etc. There is merely the flow of thinking, feeling, willing, and the moment when that flow is fixed as an object it becomes illusory. As with Spinoza generalizing Aristotle’s small s substance to capital S Substance, and making it God, we have the generalization of the many objects into the one Object, and that is the unbroken Whole. Here becoming and being are the same. Here Heraclitus and Parmenides are in agreement. Here becoming is being and being is becoming. Here there is no change, yet there is constant change. That very change is the definition which doesn’t change. Etc. It doesn’t change in saying that it changes.
Now, what is the ground? Is the ground separate from all of this? What even is ‘a’ ground? A ground is that which the rest stands on. Is the Object, or the Whole, the ground? We said the Whole is what is, and that is Truth. The Object is Truth, which seems like it doesn’t exist because what we usually mean by Truth is truth, that is logical coherence within an axiomatic system. Truth is not that. Truth is beyond logic. Truth is order. Which doesn’t have to be ordered. The fact that some one can order means that there’s order to distinguish an orderer and an ordered. The noun comes through the verb, and the only noun that can be co-equal with the verb is the noun which is the verb. Which is the same as saying that the core function is a name for a process. The ground is then Order. Is The Object or The Whole or that which is both in motion but yet still the ground, or is that an emanation of the Ground? It seems one would have to say that it’s an emanation of the Ground. Order is the one, and the ground is the zero. The ground can’t die because it’s always dead, yet all life comes through it, so it’s always alive. We have something like this then. The ground is both dead and alive; and the Whole is both in motion and yet still. This is the 0 and the 1. The 1 emanates from the 0. Out of that which is both birth and death, the alpha and the omega, we get that which is the unchanging fact of change. The absolute, is the alpha and the omega, it is that which is always alive yet always dead. Which is and is not. Which is beyond logic.
What is mind? The mind is the ground. Order emanates out of the mind, and is the whole. In that sense, the Whole is the body of the mind. The body of the mind dies into the mind. The one dies into the zero. God dies into the Godhead. Positivity dies into negativity, and negativity does not die. The zero is that which is both alive and dead, which is the mind, the one is that which is the unchanging change, and the two is duality. The two is the first multiplicity that is also a unity, and that is in this way the trinity which embodies the principle of creativity, when disjunctive multiplicty becomes conjunctive unity. Then, this process of division and unification goes on ad infinitum, until the One, the Object, the Infinite, is divided into the infinitesimal, and so forgetting time we see that the Whole is the infinite-infinitesimal of unchanging-change.